Unless otherwise indicated herein, the materials described in this section are not prior art to the claims of this application and are not admitted to be prior art by inclusion in this section.
Memory may be a source of failure in a computer system. In order to help address potential memory failures, different fault-protection mechanisms have been developed to assist in recovering more quickly in the event of a memory failure. One mechanism that might be used to protect against failure of persistent storage devices, such as hard disks, is the use of a redundant array of independent disks (RAID) mechanism. Generally, RAID may distribute data across different storage devices according to the RAID scheme utilized (e.g., RAID 0, RAID 1, RAID 2, RAID 3, RAID 4, RAID 5, RAID 6). Distributing the data across the different storage devices using the RAID mechanism may use multiple memory accesses for each write.
Another mechanism that may be used to protect against device failures is a memory duplication-based mechanism. For example, each write to a memory may include a first write of data to the memory and a second write to another memory to produce a copy of the data. As such, a duplication-based mechanism may lead to using twice as much memory as compared to not duplicating the memory. Each of these different fault-protection mechanisms can have different strengths and weaknesses. In some cases, it can be challenging to select the fault-protection mechanism to use.